Modern data storage systems primarily rely on optical and magnetic media to record massive volumes of data that may be efficiently accessed, retrieved, and copied. As the amount of data created every day continues to increase, though, there is an ongoing need for reliable, high-density storage systems. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) based storage platforms offer the possibility of achieving these goals. The proposed platforms have the potential to overcome existing bottlenecks of classical recorders as they offer ultrahigh storage densities on the order of 1015-1020 bytes per gram of DNA. Experiments have shown that with DNA-based storage technologies one can record files as large as 200 MB, and ensure long-term data integrity through encapsulation and coding. In addition, one can accommodate random access and rewriting features through specialized addressing.
While DNA-based storage systems have been successfully demonstrated, such systems are limited. Current DNA-based storage architectures rely on synthesizing the DNA content once and retrieving it many times. Retrieval is exclusively performed via high-throughput sequencing technologies designed for laboratories that are not portable. Portable sequencers exclusively use nanopores, which have been known to introduce a prohibitively large number of deletion, insertion, and substitution errors (with some estimates as high as 38%) during read operations. Comparatively, the error rates of modern magnetic and optical systems rarely exceed 1 bit in 10 terabytes. Such high error rates have hindered the practical use of nanopore sequencers for DNA-based data storage applications.